The Dark and Gathering Sameness of the World

1. Singapore, the story of tigers: How zoos hold out false promise of preserving biodiversity and, in addition to rendering most of their inmates insane, actually encourage the hunting of species to extinction by those who pursue the perverse ‘market philosophy’ that the fewer there are, the greater bounty they will command.
2. Costa Rica, the story of macaws: How habitat loss, due to human agriculture, grazing, forest ‘products’, urban sprawl and even well-intentioned ‘parks’, is producing the fastest rate of species extinction in 65 million years.
3. Russia, the story of fish: How illegal logging, illegal hunting, poaching and organized crime contributes to species extinction, starting on land and moving to the sea, and starting always with the largest species and moving to the smaller as the larger are exterminated.
4. Vancouver Island, the story of cougars: How overpopulation, the pushing of people and their domesticated plants and animals into more and more remote areas in search of land, recreation and the spiritual need for wilderness, is wiping out species that had previously proved resilient to human encroachment.
5. Norway, the story of whales: How the shift from subsistence to industrial harvesting of animals and plants, and the resultant shift of wealth and power from community to a remote, uncaring elite, is exterminating life in the sea.
6. North America, the story of plants: How monoculture, the planting and husbandry of single engineered species in place of astonishingly diverse native fruits, vegetables, trees and farmed animals, has impoverished the food chain and led to a staggering reduction, first in plants, and then in the animals that lived on them, while making human food supplies immeasurably more fragile and vulnerable.
7. Nagaland (India/Burma border), the story of hotspots (what PBS calls Living Edens): How a few dozen areas around the planet, many still offering both biological and cultural (including language, health, and other knowledge) diversity unmatched anywhere else, are now under siege from overpopulation, slash-and-burn agriculture, monolithic religions, ‘modernization’ and political corruption and interference.

The consequence of this is a “plague of sameness” and the loss of a distinct species every ten minutes. Some types of fruits and vegetables have lost 90% of their variants. An entire language disappears every two weeks. “We are not gaining knowledge with every human generation”, Glavin says, “we are losing it”. “All these extinctions are related…and the language of environmentalism is wholly inadequate to the task of describing what is happening…It doesn’t have the words for it”. Wherever he travels, he says, he finds the overwhelming majority of people are troubled by this loss of diversity, but at a loss to know what to do about it.

He unearths some interesting and astonishing facts in his research: Did you know that the Bronx zoo once proudly included aboriginal peoples in its ‘exhibits’? Or that Vladimir Putin abolished Russia’s environmental protection agency, forest service and conservation authorities?

“We are living in an age when we will at last discover the answer to the question that has haunted philosophers from time out of mind. It’s the question about whether humanity is capable of determining its own destiny. We should know that by about 2030. Certainly not much later…To find some parallel with the conditions of recklessness and excess that prevail in the world…you have to look at those desperate moments in human history, those moments just before everything falls apart.” He draws parallels in particular with the situation in Ireland just before the horrific potato famine.

In his prologue, he suggests that we may be headed for a titanic human struggle between two human ‘survival myths’, those of engineers and of naturalists. The engineers are those who fear and hate nature, who loathe complexity and diversity, who espouse the murderous ethic of the Puritans, who seek protection from fear and danger and death in genetic engineering, cryogenics, the homogenization and desensitization of humanity and culture, separateness from ‘nature as other’, immortality, and the extermination of all life that is not in the service of humans. The naturalists are those who suffer the grief of biophilia, who embrace complexity and celebrate diversity, whose ethic is one of sacred responsibility and respect for all life on Earth, who oppose technologies that increase ecological fragility and uniformity, and who accept that we are part of, not apart from, all life on our planet. The engineers, today, have the power and momentum, and are on the offensive; the naturalists still have the numbers but are always fighting a defensive, rear-guard battle. What makes the struggle so hard for the naturalists is that so many humans today know of no other life than an engineered, artificial one, and their proportion is growing. Now it is only ‘natural’ that they should fear a ‘natural’ way of living that they don’t know and cannot, any longer, even imagine.

In the meantime, the dark and gathering sameness of the world keeps increasing, as biological and cultural diversity wither. Ultimately, Glavin says,